She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief."Why not, if one doesn't KNOW?" After which, as their eyes, over his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened, and something to his purpose came prodigiously out of her very face.His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, and he gasped with the force of a perception to which, on the instant, everything fitted.The sound of his gasp filled the air; then he became articulate."I see--if I don't suffer!"In her own look, however, was doubt."You see what?""Why what you mean--what you've always meant."She again shook her head."What I mean isn't what I've always meant.It's different.""It's something new?"
She hung back from it a little."Something new.It's not what you think.I see what you think."His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong."It isn't that I AM a blockhead?" he asked between faintness and grimness."It isn't that it's all a mistake?""A mistake?" she pityingly echoed.THAT possibility, for her, he saw, would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in mind."Oh no," she declared; "it's nothing of that sort.You've been right."Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed, speaking but to save him.It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude."Are you telling me the truth, so that I shan't have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know? I HAVEN'T lived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion? I haven't waited but to see the door shut in my face?"She shook her head again."However the case stands THAT isn't the truth.Whatever the reality, it IS a reality.The door isn't shut.The door's open," said May Bartram.
"Then something's to come?"
She waited once again, always with her cold sweet eyes on him.
"It's never too late." She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if still charged with the unspoken.Her movement might have been for some finer emphasis of what she was at once hesitating and deciding to say.He had been standing by the chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a small perfect old French clock and two morsels of rosy Dresden constituting all its furniture; and her hand grasped the shelf while she kept him waiting, grasped it a little as for support and encouragement.She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited.It had become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to him that she had something more to give him; her wasted face delicately shone with it--it glittered almost as with the white lustre of silver in her expression.She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while their talk of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to present it as inordinately soft.This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the more gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant.The end, none the less, was that what he had expected failed to come to him.
Something else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere closing of her eyes.She gave way at the same instant to a slow fine shudder, and though he remained staring--though he stared in fact but the harder--turned off and regained her chair.
It was the end of what she had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.
"Well, you don't say--?"
She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk back strangely pale."I'm afraid I'm too ill.""Too ill to tell me?" it sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips, the fear she might die without giving him light.He checked himself in time from so expressing his question, but she answered as if she had heard the words.
"Don't you know--now?"
"'Now' -?" She had spoken as if some difference had been made within the moment.But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with them."I know nothing." And he was afterwards to say to himself that he must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his hands of the whole question.
"Oh!" said May Bartram.
"Are you in pain?" he asked as the woman went to her.
"No," said May Bartram.
Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystification.
"What then has happened?"
She was once more, with her companion's help, on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and had reached the door.Yet he waited for her answer.
"What WAS to," she said.